The hip-hop group who inspired Slick Rick: “Very stimulating”
Looking back at what exactly drew Slick Rick, he does not refer to records and radio hits. Rather, he remembers the schoolyards and block parties in the Bronx where the Cold Crush Brothers would turn the sidewalks into stages. “Nothing moved me like the Cold Crush Brothers did”, he has said years later, when he recalled how their sound rocking on the street could be heard.
At times, he could not even glimpse them, only catch the sound of the voices and beats echoing in the night air. To Rick, it was electric. It was, he said, “a very stimulating one”, and a charge that remained with him a long time after the music had ceased.
The Cold Crush Brothers were not a regular crew. They were one of the first organizations to demonstrate that hip-hop could be more than rapping over a break beat. Their list was filled with MCs and DJs, Tony Tone, Easy AD, Grandmaster Caz, Whipper Whip and Mr. Tee and DJ Charlie Chase; who made every set sound like a full-scale production.
Their distinguishing feature was the routines: chants with plenty of harmony, meticulously executed call-and-response, and even stomps on the stage. In an era when rap was still crude and improvised, Cold Crush made performance more of a theatre, making something memorable. It was that showmanship that attracted young Slick Rick.
After relocating to the Bronx in 1976, after leaving London, he was in the birthplace of hip-hop at a time when it was taking off. By high school, he was writing down rhymes every day and was trying to create his own Kangol Crew, but the actual schooling was on the streets. “They did their business in the school yard…. it was free, and that was all”, he recalled. “We would see a lot of things or hear a lot of things loud. It was, you see, a great sport”.
These free performances became his classroom, and he learned how to rule the stage and how a performance could turn a crowd. The influence of Cold Crush Brothers went all the way out to the Bronx pavements. They were the stars of its early battles and were involved in legendary fights with rival crews such as the Fantastic Five in a clash in 1981.
Their influence extended into the chronicles as well: the lyrics of Grandmaster Caz appeared in the song of the Sugarhill Gang, called ‘Rapper’s Delight’, and Cold Crush DNA was incorporated into one of the earliest worldwide hits of rap. By the time formal singles such as Weekend came out in 1982, their fame had spread through bootleg recordings of live performances. Children in the city exchanged those cassettes, spreading the myth of their power and precision.
This was the ambience of Slick Rick, this made him sensible. He also caught not only the beats but also the discipline that is the spectacle. This sense of form as well as style led him to praise how they had “good routines, and that they chose good records to rhyme on”.
In contrast to other crews who were dependent on chaos, Cold Crush provided a blueprint, practice, perfect, and finally dazzle. That spirit would emerge in the future in the career of Rick himself, in which even his humorous anecdotes were marked with an air of polish.
The other influence that Rick recalls about the Bronx scene was the lighter side of it, with Busy Bee Starski being one of its stars. The comic pant of Busy Bee and his famous scat-line, “Bah-diddy-bah-do-bang-do-bang”, echoed through schoolyards and battlefields. He demonstrated to Rick how humour could fit into rap and not all rhymes had to be fatal.
But even as Rick retained some fondness of Busy Bee, he pointed out that “the Cold Crush Brothers were his greatest inspiration”. They were the only ones in his pantheon of heroes. Their fingerprints are all over the later work of Rick. Tracks such as La-Di-Da-Di and Children Story became classics not only due to the lyrics, but also due to the manner in which Rick narrated them, half storyteller, half actor and quite aware of how to keep an audience glued.
That probity, that temperance of routine and spontaneity, was directly due to those evenings standing on the fence of a schoolyard in the Bronx, and absorbing what Cold Crush said. Theirs is not an abstract legacy in the memory of Rick. It is based on the visuals and auditory of a society finding itself, in the manner live music seeped into the streets to be heard by anyone who cared to listen. In his own language, they were “very stimulating”: evidence that hip-hop could excite, inspire and transform a young life even before it hit the airwaves.